This amazing message was sent to the Reclaim the Power camp last month by people fighting against destructive extractive industries in Ghana. We are all part of the same struggle for global justice and a safe planet for all the world's peoples. If you want to send a message of support back to these inspiring African campaigners, check out the extra information at the end of the message. International solidarity will be a vital part of our eventual victory over the corporations that seek to plunder our present and our future. Here's the message: please read it and share it far and wide! SOLIDARITY MESSAGE: LET US STRENGTHEN OUR ECO-RESISTANCE CONNECTIONS TO WIN GLOBAL JUSTICE! Thank you very much for making Balcombe one of the most glaringly empowering flashpoints that is adding more lustre to our everburning Flame of Global Justice Resistance against the vampire transnational corporate predators and their hirelings and quislings bent on killing our dearest Mother Earth and all of us her children. We are echoing your voices of defiance in our own battles here in Krobo and spreading your message and exemplary efforts of Environmental Justice Freedomfighting widely to inspire ourselves and our kindred Communities of Resistance throughout Ghana and Afrika. Do please also help to amplify our Krobo and other voices of Pan-Afrikan Resistance for Global Justice in your own battles in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe and the rest of the World. Let us keep doing things that will strengthen our connections of true grassroots People-to-Peoples' Internationalist Solidarity by linking together, across oceans and borders, interested groups of Activists in schools, colleges, universities, other community places of Lifelong Learning, work, faith-worship, work and even leisure in Balcombe and other parts of the United Kingdom to ours here in Ghana. This is one of the most challenging imperatives of our common Struggle that we must tackle more boldly, honestly and perseveringly in order to move forward with greater strength of principled Unity towards the definitive victory of Global Justice for all! Let us be mindful that we must fight everywhere necessary, but we must fight not simply to keep on fighting on the same issues forever; we must fight wisely in order to defeat our adversaries on concrete matters of our time and advance to win resounding victories. Together, in genuine Ubuntu Internationalist Solidarity, we shall win. So, as we say in the Pan-Afrikan movement for Global Justice: *Let us wisely fight harder at our combat posts and in various trenches all over the World in such interconnected ways and means of Ubuntu so as to more strongly link up our many Freedomfighting Battlegrounds into a One Love Frontline of victorious Global Justice Resistance!* Ayekooo! Ubuntumandla! Power to our Peoples! Dademantse Djembi Lawer Chair, Krobo Community Regeneration for Sustainable Development Action Forum (KCORSDAF) Dede Morbor Marteko Martey Co-General Secretary Planet Repairs Youth Positive Action Campaign (PRYPAC) Kojo Prah Annan Co-Vice-Chair Climate Alliance of Ghana for Sustainable World Development (CAGSWOD) Principal Organising Secretary, Pan-Afrikan Forum of Ghana (PAFOG) Co-Assistant Organising Secretary, Grassroots South-North Internationalist Forum (GRASSNIF) Nuaso, Krobo, Eastern Region, Ghana APPEAL FOR SOLIDARITY: [Check out the appeal below and please send messages of support and solidarity to: PRYPAC Mailbag, ASASEYAAMMA Suite, c/o PANAFRIKANYEMEI-PAFOG-GRASSNIF Connexions, P. O. Box 6881, Accra-North, Greater Accra Region, Ghana. West Afrika. If you have ideas for solidarity actions and campaigns, get in touch with us at info@nodashforgas.org.uk and we can put you in touch with the right people.] Dear Eco-Justice Friends in Defence of all Human, Peoples' and Mother Earth Rights, INTERNATIONALIST ECO-SOLIDARITY APPEAL TO HELP STOP SCANCEM-HEIDELBERGCEMENT FROM PERPETRATING ECOCIDE IN GHANA "The Earth is not dying; it is being killed; and those who are killing it have names and addresses." - Utah Phillips We, the representatives of a broad range of Environmental Justice organisations, networks and campaigns in Ghana, rising upon the initiative of the proactively leading GreenStar Youthguard Activists of the Planet Repairs Youth Positive Action Campaign (PRYPAC), have come together to make this urgent appeal for Eco-Solidarity Internationalist Support from all of you. We are seeking your help in order to internationally expose, challenge and stop Scancem International and HeidelbergCement from continuing, with arrogant racist impunity, to commit atrocious crimes of Ecocide in Ghana. For many years, indeed for over three decades now, Scancem International, joined later on by HeidelbergCement, have been wickedly acting through Ghacem, their subsidiary in our country, to destabilize our Environmental Security, jeopardize our Biodiversity and wantonly destroy our Environment as a whole, thereby impacting terribly upon life for the vast majority of our people, especially the poorest of our Poor, in the Krobo area of the Eastern Region of Ghana. Founded 30th August 1967 by the Government of Ghana in collaboration with the company then known as Norcem AS of Norway, Ghacem became almost entirely owned by foreign transnational corporate magnates when, between 1997 and 1999, it was reorganised into the Ghana subsidiary of both Scancem International, with its headquarters in Oslo, Norway, and HeidelbergCement, with its headquarters in Heidelberg, Germany. From then onwards, the racist contempt of Afriphobia became more evident in the unethical business misconduct, disrespectful malpractices and outrageous abuses of the Scancem-Heidelberg bosses of Ghacem towards people in our country. With the connivance of a few privileged crooks in the high echelons of the traitorous Elite who have chosen to be servicing Neocolonialism under the neoliberal capitalist tutelage of Imperialism in Ghana today, aided and abetted by some ignorant but rapaciously greedy politicians, unscrupulous pretenders to our ethnic community chieftaincy and cutthroat fortune-hunters, Ghacem and its foreign bosses have been encroaching upon more of Krobo land, deliberately trespassing into the farms of many peasants and family cultivators, and also violating stool and community natural reservations as well as virgin forests and other uniquely pristine environs. Through Ghacem, therefore, Scancem International and HeidelbergCement are viciously committing horrendous crimes of Ecocide by recklessly despoiling our Krobo environment in their plunderous search for clinker to manufacture cement. They are misusing hazardous explosives, toxic substances, dangerous vehicles, machines and other heavy technological equipment clearly unsuitable for our Krobo terrain and its environs; they are resorting to questionable business malpractices, exceedingly risky methods, harshly exploitative working regimes and other abuses offensive to our community's high standards of respect for human, peoples' and Mother Earth rights; they are blasting into wasteful smithereens our sacred mountains, hills and other elevated terrains; they are not only barbarically disfiguring our extraordinarily beautiful landscape, materially rich and spiritually invaluable natural resources and all other associated wealth of tangible and intangible cultural heritage; they are also atrociously poisoning our air, water, food and herbal medicinal sources, with terribly adverse consequences for our whole community health, as we are being increasingly made more knowledgeable about by our Scholar-Activist friends of the Ghana Environmental Health International Monitoring Action Research Project (GEHIMARP); they are destroying farms and shattering our Biodiversity habitats, farm-huts, cottages, houses and other residential dwellings of people in our Krobo area; indeed, they are callously perpetrating all sorts of heinous crimes of Ecocide! Our often repeated legitimate demand for the free public circulation, open discussion and critical review of the Environmental Impact Assessment Report (EIAR), which is required by the laws of Ghana for Scancem International and HeidelbergCement to even start doing any business such as theirs in our country, has for many years now gone unheeded with impunity by Ghacem and its criminal accomplices in the local, national and international organs of governmental, state and non-governmental scrutiny. Indeed, some unscrupulous careerist apparatchiks in the bureaucracy of dubious non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and charities, including the Ghacem Foundation and its so-called Academy and their associates, even those paying lip-service to the Environment, appear in fact to cherish more the bribes they get in order to help cover up such abominable crimes of Ecocide, rather than value the lives of people, the richness of our Biodiversity of Nature and the sacred rights of our most preciously beloved Mother Earth! That is why we, the undersigned representatives of the organisations, networks and campaigns mentioned below, have decided to make this earnest appeal for help to you, our dear friends in the international movement for Environmental Justice, particularly those of you in Norway/Scandinavia, Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Scancem International and HeidelbergCement are, through Ghacem, doing with racist contempt to our people and the Krobo environment what they dare not attempt in their own countries of origin and anywhere else in Europe today. You ought therefore to help us stop right now their escalating crimes of Ecocide here in Ghana before it gets too late. We are very much aware of the fact that the pollution of our spaces here in the Krobo area shall eventually spread environmental damages far and wider beyond our country Ghana and continent of Afrika to endanger your own lives in Europe and the Biodiversity of Nature throughout our planet Earth and the whole Cosmos. That is why all of us are rallying together with the GreenStar Youthguard Activists of the Planet Repairs Youth Positive Action Campaign (PRYPAC) and asking you to join us in planning appropriate actions of Eco-Solidarity Internationalism that will draw the masses of our youth, and the vast majority of peoples throughout Europe, Afrika and the World, into the kind of principled unity of action that can persuade the corporate magnates of Scancem Internationaland HeidelbergCement to act with their consciences to put a full stop to their repugnant crimes of Ecocide against us all, Humanity! We are all the ones we we have been waiting for to act together in unison as Eco-Justice Changemakers in defence of our one and only dearest Mother Earth. Accordingly, we shall highly appreciate your own proposals and suggestions for Positive Action on this matter to be carried out by you in your own country/countries of operation, and/or internationally by all those interested in such activities. Do please let us hear back from you as soon as possible. An injury to one is an injury to all! Peoples, conscientized, united and engaged harmoniously together in Positive Action, are the Change! The strength of our principled unity in Eco-Solidarity Internationalism will give us all our deserved Victory for Global Justice! Sincerely yours with fraternal regards of high esteem, Co-Signed: (1) Ms. Dede M. Martey, Co-General Secretary, Planet Repairs Youth Positive Action Campaign (PRYPAC) (2) Martey R. Kpabitey, Principal Coordinator, Krobo Community Regeneration for Sustainable Development Action Forum (KCORSDAF); Co-Assistant Organising Secretary, Ghana In Sustainable Transition (GIST); Member of the Interim National Coordinating Committee (INCC), Climate Alliance of Ghana for Sustainable World Development (CAGSWOD); (3) Kojo Prah Annan, Co-Vice Chair, Climate Alliance of Ghana for Sustainable World Development (CAGSWOD); Co-Deputy Convening Secretary, ASASEYAAMMA Pan-Afrikan Green Campaign for Global Justice; Co-Assistant Organising Secretary, Grassroots South-North Internationalist Forum (GRASSNIF).
